In Chuck Klosterman’s new book, “The Nineties,” he writes that decade’s fixation on authenticity and not selling out was never far from mind. So as he finished the book, he realized he wasn’t sure how to feel about promoting it.

“I’ve spent a year or whatever thinking about the ’90s, and almost reentering my mindset from the ’90s,” he says from his home in Portland. “It really has reminded me of how the idea of just trying to convince people to like what you did used to be so humiliating.”

Klosterman, who turned 18 in 1990, laughs at the absurdity of that, and also how much has changed from the ’90s, when to promote oneself was to be branded a sell-out, and today, when, well, self-promotion is what we all do all the time on social media.

“Now I look on Twitter or I look on Facebook and I see people whose pretty much entire existence is this kind of self-promoting of themselves,” Klosterman says. “They would have been on the furthest fringe of what was seen as almost overt sellout behavior.

“And now it’s the normal way to do things.”

In “The Nineties,” Klosterman writes about the 1994 film “Reality Bites” as emblematic of a certain kind of Generation X attitude, and about the ways in which Nirvana changed rock and roll even as the genre lost its monolithic grip on the world of popular music.

He writes of movies and the influence of video stores on directors such as Quentin Tarantino on ’90s cinema, and the ways in which people consumed television whether they were watching hugely popular series such as “Friends” or the O.J. Simpson slow-speed chase.

He takes on politics in a chapter focused on the Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush and the peculiar challenge Bush faced in independent candidate Ross Perot.

And, of course, Klosterman deals with the rise of the internet in several essays including one that opens with the best-written description you will ever read of the sound of a dial-up modem connecting to America Online.

“I put a lot of effort into that,” Klosterman says, laughing when complimented on his close scrutiny of a 32-second YouTube video of the AOL sign-on. “I looked at that thing like 40 times.”

A second look

“The Nineties” came to Klosterman partly out of a desire to complement or correct an earlier book on the decade, he says.

“I wrote that book ‘Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs,’ which came out 20 years ago now, and that was in many ways a ’90s book too, except that it was purely my personal experience,” he says.

“It was just completely subjective. I think people were drawn to that book in some ways because it did seem like a kind of polemic about the culture that had just occurred.”

Two decades later, Klosterman says he felt “minor, mild regrets” about the way his younger self had portrayed the ’90s.

“I was like, ‘I did that book, and I just wasn’t ready to do it in a way that I felt like would still feel good to me years later,” he says. “So part of it was almost like, ‘I’m going to do this again, but instead of being subjective, I’m just going to be as objective as possible.’

“I know, in the coming years, there’s going to be a lot of writing about this period,” Klosterman says. “And the way people write about history now is purely through a subjective lens, that’s almost built on the idea that you’re revising what the conventional take is.

“So I wrote the conventional take in some ways. Like this is the book those people can disagree with.”

Twists and turns

“The Nineties” might be Klosterman’s idea of a traditional take, but it’s also a fascinating way of looking at specific moments and finding connections that speak to a larger truth.

The rise of politically correct speech opens one chapter that then veers off into examinations of the opposite kind of speech in 2 Live Crew’s “As Nasty As They Want To Be” and Ice-T’s “Cop Killer,” recorded by his Body Count band.

A chapter on Michael Jordan’s dalliance with baseball after dominating basketball jumps sideways into the decline of baseball in the era of labor strife and steroids.

The essay on Bush, Perot, the Gulf War and Bill Clinton was the first one he wrote, mostly, Klosterman says, because he’d never before written anything so purely based on research. The chapter on Nirvana and grunge came next.

“That sort of creates the tone,” Klosterman says. “In both of those essays, what ended up happening is I’m describing an event, and then found myself trying to describe why it still seems significant to me for reasons that transcend the subject itself.

“In other words, what’s the non-musical importance of Nirvana? What is the socio-cultural significance of one-fifth of the voting population voting for Perot?

“I’m looking at things that are sort of universally seen as touchstones of the time,” he says. “I’m going to try to describe why that ended up having a meaning larger than itself.”

That made sense to him, he says, because the universal never truly is.

“There’s no situation that impacts all people in the same way or at the same time,” Klosterman says. “So what I was looking for are things that ended up unconsciously impacting people, even if they didn’t view it as central to their own personal experience.”

Take Tarantino, who signaled a new direction in cinema as the young director of films such as “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction.”

“Somebody can very easily say, ‘I had no interest in Quentin Tarantino films in the ’90s,” Klosterman says. “But Tarantino’s cinematic philosophy was emblematic of the time, so if you watched film at all, you were unconsciously impacted by what this person was doing.”

Time and the internet

Though the internet didn’t really explode until the new millennium, its looming presence runs throughout “The Nineties.” It’s also the main reason Klosterman came to believe the ’90s might be the last distinctive stand-alone decade we’ll know.

“I get a growing sense that the ’90s weren’t just the last decade of the 20th century, but in many ways the last decade that we’re going to experience by the old definition of what a decade is,” Klosterman says.

The late English culture writer Mark Fisher’s theory on time was a significant influence in how “The Nineties” was written, Klosterman says.

“He had this idea called the slow cancellation of the future,” he says. “The experience of time was kind of like going down this road, a linear road. The scenery changes as you move along, and the scenery is the culture.

“If you want to go back to something, you had to almost turn around and retrace your steps,” he says. “But suddenly the internet emerges.”

In the ’90s, people thought the internet, with its scope and speed, would accelerate the culture, Klosterman says.

“And it seems to have somewhat of the opposite impact,” he says. “It seems to have decelerated the culture because we now have access to all content at the exact same time. It’s not like we move past something and forget it. It just kind of becomes part of the mix.”

Now, instead of identifying culture and politics and society by the decades in which events happened, it’s all there, all of the time.

“As a consequence, it feels like everything is changing constantly, and yet at the same time, it doesn’t necessarily feel like it’s moving forward,” Klosterman says.

The timelines blur, and eventually, so too will memories of things such as “Reality Bites,” Nirvana and all the rest that we still pinpoint today as pieces of the ’90s.

“The ’90s were the last period where that was still happening,” Klosterman says. “But maybe in a distant future, the only thing people will care about the ’90s is that’s where the internet started.”

Related Articles